Security and privacy
In a joint letter sent to High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, William Lacy Swing, Director General of the International Organization for Migration, and UN experts, a group of organisations urged these authorities to investigate reports that the United States is demanding that visitors provide access to their electronic devices as well as passcodes to those devices and online accounts. These practices persist in violation o...
In a joint letter sent to High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, William Lacy Swing, Director General of the International Organization for Migration, and UN experts, a group of organisations urged these authorities to investigate reports that the United States is demanding that visitors provide access to their electronic devices as well as passcodes to those devices and online accounts. These practices persist in violation o...
Social Media Exchange (SMEX) is a registered Lebanese NGO that works to advance self-regulating information societies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). While they engage globally, Lebanon is their home, making Arab society and culture their primary context for action. APCNews interviewed Jessica Dheere and Mohamad Najem, the co-directors of SMEX, which just joined the APC network. APC...
The ever-growing advancement of information technology is not without perils. Online privacy has been at stake for a while now and the protection of personal information is under attack. We no longer have control over our private data. It is now a commodity up for sale to the highest bidders. And a repository for the state actors who are suspiciously going through it to determine if we can be t...
I participated in the 10th annual Internet Governance Forum in Guadalajara, Mexico last month in December 2016. My topic of focus for the sessions in which I participated and attended was on bringing a human rights perspective to cybersecurity through multistakeholder mechanisms. One of the spaces for solid dialogue on this topic was one of the four IGF Best Practice Forums, the Cybersecurity B...
Black Lives Matter is a key movement in the response against police abuse, brutality and misconduct. Since 15 April 2016, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) website has been protected by Deflect, a program made available by Canadian APC member organisation eQualit.ie, following a spate of distributed denial of service (DDoS) and hacking attacks. Deflect is a website security project laying the ground...
Surveillance has historically functioned as an oppressive tool to control women’s bodies and is closely related to colonial modes of managing populations. Big data, metadata and the technologies used to collect, store and analyse them are by no means neutral, but come with their own exclusions and biases. This paper highlights the gendered and racialised effects of data practices; outlines th...
It was revealed this week that at least seven journalists in Quebec, working for Radio-Canada, La Presse and La Journal de Montréal, have been spied on by the Montreal police (SPVM) and Quebec provincial police (SQ). Further revelations have shown journalists to have been under surveillance since 2008, some for as long as five years at a time. Some were cases of “pen register” surveillance...
The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) welcomes the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the resolution on the right to privacy in the digital age* and expresses appreciation for the leadership by Brazil and Germany. This year’s resolution, the third such UNGA resolution on this topic, was adopted by consensus with over 60 co-sponsors. It adds substantive language on the role of ...
At last week’s sixth annual Freedom Online Conference, the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) launched policy recommendations for human rights-based approaches to cybersecurity, a product of one of three FOC working groups. The launch of the recommendations represents a culmination of a two-year, multistakeholder dialogue among working group members who represent governments, the private sector, ...
Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2018
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